Ben Harland wrote:I was wondering how I would go about possibly 'eyedropping' colours from a saved .png of my colour palette into a test shot (with separate colours selected for gain, gamma and lift) so I can see what it might look like.
Although I completely disagree thoroughly with the technical approach, I can appreciate the artistic direction.
If you have a saved png test image, why not import it into Resolve and use it as a target to define a transform that you might use as an export LUT? This is similar to how we did it in the olden days, when a commercial client would bring in a page of Vogue magazine and we would grade accordingly. One clip at a time. Because that is how you do it. Not all of your source clips will present the values you will need to achieve your target look, and you are going to have to process them so that pixel A, with value [R,G,B] will flow through the matrix to end up being [R',G',B']. Ignoring Charles Poynton, now yelling at me from the sidelines that I should not be using ['] because its reserved for gamma-transformed values.
Stia calma.
You can get a sort of analysis with an eyedropper that will display numeric values or representational locations on the transfer curve, for a particular pixel. But in truth, these are virtually useless numbers. What you are extracting is really the difference between where the pixel started out and where you want to go with it. Which is going to change for every source clip.
Is your intention to achieve a sort of zonal scheme, where the dark-, mid-, and light- areas of the transmitted image have their own tone characteristic -- ie, green blacks, aqua mids and amber highlights? That sort of thing?
Something else to try might be the auto-match feature that was incorporated recently... Its covered in the manual. Group a selection of shots, designate one of them (your png reference, either as a still or an exported movie) as a reference and then click *match to that* and see what happens. Could be a big surprise.
The only thing about this interesting craft (that in some ways keeps me entertained, anyway) is that it is a bit musical in the way that sometimes novel approaches, even mistaken ones can have serendipitous results that can be oddly pleasing. If we didn't have "alternate tunings" we wouldn't have "Start Me Up" for example.
jPo, CSI